In known control entities and/or control methods of this type for electrostatic precipitators, a server program communicates with the high-voltage supply units and auxiliary functional units and provides cyclical and event-driven communication for the client modules of the control entity. The corresponding data which is received in the client modules is assigned to the electrostatic precipitators, visually displayed or used for optimization there, i.e. in the client modules. Using this approach, the assignment or classification of the received data to the electrostatic precipitators must be managed by each client module itself. If there is a plurality of electrostatic precipitators, the complexity of these management tasks increases drastically. The checking effort involved in verification of the functionality of the software increases significantly, since it is not possible using justifiable effort to check all conceivable configurations. The computing effort also increases since specific data, e.g. the total electrical power, has to be calculated in a plurality of client modules, e.g. in the client modules which are used for visual display and optimization. Furthermore, the quantity of data which must be transmitted over the connection between the server component and the client modules is comparatively high.